


Asleep Against The Window Pane

by action-cat (clytemnestras)



Series: long daynights [3]
Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Trans, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues, Minor Violence, Therapy, Trans Female Character, Transgirl Pete Wentz, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 19:54:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3581883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/action-cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Mikey’s phone buzzes on his knee in a near constant stream of messages, and it solidifies him where he’s shaking. He is still wanted, still craved.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Mikey goes to therapy, encounters Hurricane Pete and falls in love, in that order</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asleep Against The Window Pane

**Author's Note:**

> This can mostly be read standalone I think, but for reference: a) Gerard is genderfluid and suffered a fall leading to them wearing a backbrace b) Mikey has previously been hospitalised by mental health problems and c) Frank adopted a cat, her name is Ziggy. this is set post that story, but pre-epilogue
> 
> warnings: non-graphic violence against a trans character, descriptions of manic episodes, sex, underage drinking and gabe saporta

Mikey feels like his mind is going to crawl out of his ears. He knows the right words for it. Knows it’s mania, restless urges inside his bones, brain swimming with half-formed ideas that have kept him awake for the last two nights.

It’s unnerving, to wait for the impending crash.

It’s right on the edge of his consciousness, as the session leader paces the room, smiling soft and speaking softer, just how close he is to snapping back to the greyscale.

No one is watching Mikey, and Mikey does not watch. All the kids here are caught up in their own heads.

He wonders if that’s what he’s doing here, feels like he's drowning in a sea of crazies. It sounds like something Gee would paint; Mikey cradled in a rubber ring, being dragged down by clawed hands painted yellow and grey. If Gee could paint anything right now, with their back brace and broken fingers and bed a place they can’t leave.

The session leader - Brian Something - runs out of words that no one is listening to and encourages the assembled to offer forward their special trauma.

Mikey bites off a hangnail, catches the quick and licks up the blood before anybody sees.

Someone barks out a laugh and a kid with a stutter tries to bury himself into his hoodie, flopping back onto his seat. Dark eyes are fixed right on Mikey, assessing and shiny.

Given the chance, he’d punch them out.

His legs quiver and he can’t stop them, even when his elbows press them into the floor. Brian has his head in his hands through the silence, exhausted with the sadness. Mikey can’t blame him. In a room of kids whose brains are trying to kill them, he’s supposed to take back the knives. Someone in the corner is crying and nobody really cares.

The dark eyes don’t leave him, rimmed in black kohl. A smile plays on their lips.

Mikey gets up and leaves. No one really cares about that, either.

**

Calm sweeps over the day, like uncurtained sunshine falling into his body and coating him in gold.

Mikey is calm. He is not happy. The difference presses somewhere at the back of his skull in dull pressure.

Gee's backbrace makes plastic noises from somewhere in the house, hitting against doorframes or bedframes or something more solid than Gee's body.

He scratches his arm, catches for a second on an old scar and remembers the tiny licks the cat would press against them when Mikey lay back on the carpet in the silence Gee left and he cultivated.

He turns over in bed and the clock blinks red eyes at him, 9:45 am. He blinks back and then sleep comes back, calm.

He sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps.

**

He makes coffee and Gee doesn't drink any, and he lights a cigarette and she doesn't reach out for a drag.

She winces when he tries to hug her and so he stops trying.

Frank cracks his knuckles and grinds his teeth and Mikey doesn't punch him.

He thinks that means he kind of loves Frank, but that might be the prozac. He flushes the rest of the prescription down the toilet, just in case.

**

Group is a room full of children that the universe gave machine guns and waited for them to learn to shoot.

The question is which direction they point the barrel.

Brian is wearing white today, a white button down that's half undone, sleeves rolled up to flash colourful ink that Mikey can't focus on.

The dark eyes are back, gaze pressed up against his skin. They are attached to a person wearing a purple hoodie and a gravitational pull. Surrounding kids lean towards them beneath their own notice. They, though, they are leaning toward Mikey.

Past nights in clubs and under music dull the sensation. Everybody has a Mikeyway story. Everyone has a piece of Mikey sitting inside them from where he gives himself away.

Dark Eyes tells everyone to call them Pete and to tell them all their secrets. Their voice drowns out Brian's and they tell a story with too many words about a Best Buy parking lot.

Mikey hears more than he wants to.

He goes to bathroom to pull out the flask, and Pete follows him, sitting on the basin and grinning.

"You're Mikeyway."

Not a question.

"Sometimes."

Not a lie.

Mikey takes a swig of vodka and Pete chases after the flask.

Mikey turns on the tap just to hear noise. Pete finishes the flask and hands it back with a grimace. "You don't want to know how I know you?"

"You don't, so not really."

Pete grins again and pushes their lips together in a not-kiss. "I like you, Mikeyway. I think I'll let you take a peek."

Pete tastes like lip gloss and vodka. Mikey leaves the bathroom missing legs being wrapped around his hips.

He goes home alone, anyway.

**

Frank leaves. He has to, Mikey understands; his scholarship is more important than watching Gee sleep for days and days. But.

Frank is gone, and Gee is quiet and small and Mikey isn’t really a person anymore. He’s a jangle of thoughts spinning too fast in empty cages. The world continues to end very slowly around him and he just wanders like a phantom between his house and school and therapy and the night sky.

Mikey’s phone buzzes on his knee in a near constant stream of messages, and it solidifies him where he’s shaking. He is still wanted, still craved.

He doesn’t check the texts until hours after midnight, when everybody has stopped caring about him, stopped giving a shit about anything but their own dreams.

_hey man it’s pete_

__

_do u no how hard it is 2 get ur nmbr?_

__

_lol jks i got it off saporta_

__

_i no i probs creep u out but i have this theory_

__

_but w/e man call me, k? xx_

At 4:06 AM on a September morning when the sun is already trying to whiteout the sky, Mikey presses call and hangs up when Pete answers. He doesn’t sleep, not really.

**

Mikey doesn’t like the therapy room when it’s quiet, it sets his bones off wrong. But he’s early, because the quiet in the house was killing him. He thinks that it hurts his mom to see Gee they way they are, so she’s never there and Elena sleeps longer and longer into the days now and Gee shrinks when they can’t make art or feel music or touch the things that make them feel alive.

Frank’s ghost haunts the basement.

He slips in his earbuds when Brian goes to the bathroom and lets his eyes close and disappears into Thom Yorke sending lullabyes to the butcher.

He’s dragged out moments, maybe decades later when someone pulls out his left bud and then Pete is there next to him, hand pressed against his thigh and grin lighting up the space next to Mikey’s cheek.

Pete says nothing, but their hand doesn’t move.

When Mikey flees to the bathroom he tangles his fingers with Pete’s and drags them with him.

Pete crowds him against the bathroom door, hips flush against Mikey’s. “Do you think I’m pretty?”

His head falls back against the wood. “I think you confuse me.”

Pete smiles. “That’s a good answer.” They lean forward and kiss Mikey softly, lips slick with something faintly sweet.

Pete sighs against Mikey’s lips and pulls back. “Mikeyway, can I tell you a secret?”

The room is spinning in a soft kind of way around the two of them, flourescent lights washing everything in a faintly-unreal glow. Pete’s eyes are deep and smoky where they fix on his. Mikey nods.

Pete presses their forehead against his and whispers almost silently; “I’m a girl, Mikeyway. I’m a _girl_ and everything fits wrong and I told so many people and not one of them believed me.”

It's nothing, not really. A shift pronouns but the same small thoughts. Mikey leans forward and brushes his nose against Pete’s until her mouth is angled upwards and ready to meet his in a quick butterfly kiss.

He remembers lying under the covers of Gee's bed when she pressed mascara tears into her pillow, screaming that she was a girl, a fucking _girl_  and it wasn't _fair_ that someone else could tell her she wasn't and make her start to believe. “I believe you Pete, I believe that you’re a girl, okay?”

She lets out a shaky breath against his face. “I tried other groups, y’know, fucking GSAs and shit and there were these assholes telling me I wasn’t a girl, I couldn’t pass - I don’t have to fucking _pass_ as anything, I’m a girl if I say I am.”

She slams her fist on the door behind him and Mikey doesn’t flinch, it doesn’t occur to him.

“I get it, Pete, you don’t have to explain shit to me.” Calm floods into his body like the faint buzz of the bar lights and his heart beat is steady in his chest and he feels human, almost, for the first time in months.

Pete laughs and barrels backward towards the stalls, leaning against the sink. “I knew you would Mikeyway.”  

He wants to grab her, tug her down and into his arms and keep her there pressed up against his chest and it doesn’t make sense at all but nothing ever does.

“How do you know Gabe?” He asks instead.

“Oh I know everybody. But Saporta, he’s, uh, a very special kinda guy.”

Laughter spills out of Mikey’s throat, unexpected and carefree. “That’s one way of putting it.”

He leans out enough to grab her by the wrist and pull her in. He wants to kiss her again, misses lips pressed up against his and a tongue slipping into his mouth and tasting him like they care what his insides look like. He wants to kiss every bad taste out of her mouth.

He has her pressed up against the door now, a reversed snapshot of before, and he cards his fingers through her short hair and leans in.

Brian knocks on the door and yells just before their lips brush together.

**

The pills change, things get better. Lamotrigine doesn’t feel like it’s crawling around inside him and flicking switches on and off. More end up in his mouth than down the toilet, anyway.

Pete spends group writing secrets on Mikey’s arm in bright colours, spends all night keeping him awake to the sound of her inner thoughts and her breaths on the end of the line, shallow and delicate.

Pete kisses him in the doorway to the health center and pulls his lips between her teeth, tugging him close. He becomes fixated on the places the lines of their bodies intersect. Mikey is angular and sharp and where Pete might have rough edges, she shifts and curves into the spaces he can’t fill.

He leans away, but leaves his hands fisted in her hoodie, white knuckles twisted through deep purple. “Why do I only get to see you in the place happiness comes to die?”

She laughs viciously and pulls him back close. “Babe if you’re coming here your happiness died a long fucking time ago. I just. I like having this place that’s mine and yours, is that okay?”

She kisses him again, deeper.

It is okay.

**

Pete turns up at his house on Halloween, dressed as the bride of Frankenstein and throwing rocks at the window. He’s better off not asking where she got his address.

He doesn’t hear right away. He’s camped out in the basement with Gee, watching Johnny Depp fall foul of Freddie’s clutches. Mikey sits, crouched on the floor below the bed and lets Gee stroke through his hair, gentle and familiar. It feels closer than they’ve been in months, lifetimes maybe, but it’s Halloween and traditions don’t fall through as easily as broken bones do.

Except no one told Pete that, and there she is, swathed in white lace and fake blood, ambling forward into Mikey’s arms.

“Happy fucking Halloween!” She kisses him and smears lipstick all over his face, staining it reddish pink.

“Hi.”

She smiles up at him and pulls the veil down over her face, humming the wedding march lowly under her breath.

“Mikes you’re missing it! He’s chasing Nancy through the basement hurry the fuck up!”

Pete cocks her head and looks at him sideways. “Have you been keeping secret friends down in the basement Mikeyway? You’re more like Saporta than I thought.” She laughs and grabs his hand, pulling him down the stairs. “Let’s see what you’ve been holding out on me.”

He stumbles behind her into the basement, lit up in sickly green from the television glow. Gee looks up as both their feet trip over the steps and her brow creases.

“Pete?”

Mikey freezes and the world stops and screams from the tv flood the space around him.

Pete - Pete smiles up at him and then at Gee and tugs him all the way into the room, settling on the bed beside his sister.

“You know I quit the group when you fucked off to college. Everyone else there was such a dick.”

Gee raises an eyebrow at Pete. “What, you missed me so much you decided to fuck my brother?”

Pete laughs and Mikey’s body is kind of thrumming and he isn’t looking at either of them, has his eyes fixed to the on-screen carnage because it’s less violent than the thoughts in his head.

“No, no. I like Mikeyway all for himself. He’s my prince in Star Wars footie pyjamas.”

She ruffles his hair and he doesn’t flinch even though he aches to.

He can hear Gee’s smile in her voice. “Actually those are mine, and I think Frank’ll fight you for them.”

Pete slides to the floor and wraps herself around Mikey, pressing her face into his neck. He doesn’t mean to breathe her in, but he does it anyway. She smells like vanilla perfume and something sharper, deeper. He buries his face in her hair.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

She laughs again, softer this time. “I asked and you didn’t want to know, remember?”

Her hands are cold where they push up under his hoodie, just resting on his belly. The movie credits run and Gee is snoring softly on the bed and Mikey falls asleep with Pete pressed against him.

**

The club is a wildfire around him. It’s been months since he dropped into the swell of music and the crush of bodies and let himself go.

Mikey presses up too close to the guy in behind him, grinds back too hard as the rhythm picks up, his heart rate bound by the bassline. Pete plasters herself along his front and it feels good to be close and sweating and falling apart with her right there with him.

She’s wearing shorts over purple tights and his hoodie, her hair growing long and straightened to death where it swings around her shoulders, her eyes are dark gold under kohl. She’s hard against his thigh.

They dance, and alcohol never touches their lips. The shifting on the crowd presses their bodies close, closer until the movement of the crowd around them shifts them together, hips lined up. Pete pants into Mikey’s neck in the same pattern the lights flash.

She grinds against his thigh and groans into his throat and he flexes his fingers where they dig into her hips and he wants. It’s been as long since he felt the bass around his heart that he’s had legs around his waist and god he wants Pete. So he tells her, gasps it into her ear in a lull of song change and she kisses him like she’s trying to steal the words out of his mouth.

She drags him into the men’s bathroom and into a stall but he twists them so her back is against the door. Her eyeliner is smudged and slipping down her cheeks, hair falling forward, streaked red and curling slightly with sweat. He kisses her deep then slides down her body, slipping his fingers under her hoodie and sliding over her belly with his fingertips - leaning up to trace the path with his mouth and sucking bruises in a ring around her bellybutton.

Her breath is a constant beat, panting slowly and giving him a rhythm to work with, tugging down her shorts and tights and kissing/biting/kissing up along her thighs and hips.

This wasn’t how he planned this to go, too many memories of other bathrooms, sweaty and sticky and unsatisfying tastes left in his mouth hours later, but it fits. It feels right to still feel the music pumping dimly from behind the door where he marks over her skin with his teeth. It feels right to have the tile floor under his knees cold and grounding him in the moment.

He pulls back and looks up at her, pupils blown and lip bitten raw and he can almost see himself reflected in her eyes, desperate and devout. An incubus desperate for her only.

“What do you want, I can su-”

“Fingers”, she gasps, hands sliding along the door, sweaty and never finding purchase on the smooth wood. “Just fingers inside okay, please, fuck.”

She pulls a tube of lotion out of her hoodie pocket and - it’s still not how he planned it but she looks so desperate and gorgeous, her legs spread wide and her ribcage fluttering that he can’t stop for a second, slicking up a finger, just one at first, and pressing it against her until it slips inside.

**

He works the words over and over in his head until they make so much sense that they become abstract again.

_Axial burst fracture._

__

_Often caused by falling from a great height. Vertebrae loses height on both the front and back sides._

__

Gee groans roughly when the paramedic looks him over, pressing fingers into the space between his ribs and feeling for further fractures.

_With exercises and physiotherapy a backbrace may come off in 6-12 weeks._

“Fuck, _ow,_ watch it okay?”

Gee fell off the bed in his sleep two weeks before the brace was meant to come off. Mikey woke up to screaming from the basement, hoarse and cutting and he’d almost tripped down the stairs getting to him, yelling up at Elena what was wrong, to call an ambulance.

Things are mostly okay. The healing bones have split just slightly, setting recovery time back another few weeks, but it’s nothing serious, not really.

Still, Mikey sleeps wrapped around his brother, making sure he can’t fall again.

**

Pete wraps her legs around his waist on the park swing, her skirt lifting to bare her things, soft under his fingers. His hands settle on her hips but he doesn’t lean in, doesn’t try to take this further that rocking back and forth on the swingset, being swayed by the breeze autumn drags in.

She has a bruise on her cheek, hidden under a too-pink blush that doesn’t suit her skin and makes her look made of porcelain. She won’t talk about it but he can guess. He traces over it with his fingertips and she doesn’t flinch away, closes her eyes against the soft touch.

“It wouldn’t be the first guy I beat up for doing shit like this, you know. You didn’t see what the guy looked like after me and Frank -”

She leans back, away from his fingers. “And what if it wasn’t a guy?”

He’s quiet for a second, lets the soft creak of chains wash over the semi-silence of shallow breaths. “That doesn’t make it okay”, he whispers, eventually.

“Then it isn’t okay.” Her smile is sad, small, and he tries to kiss it away. The breeze picks up and golden leaves tangle in her hair.

**

Brian’s face kind of blurs in and out of focus in the stark lighting of his office. Mikey can hear him talking but it doesn't settle in because he knows it’s too soon to be having another episode, knows that the pills are finally helping and his life is semi-stable; but since Gee fell again, almost broke and left him, again he sleeps so little and he moves so much and the world feels like it’s seeping down around him and melting away.

“Mikey are you listening?”

He likes Brian, almost. Thinks that he cares about the people he tries to help. That he wants to help. It’s so hard to make himself look Brian in they eyes and say he only goes to group so the doctors are appeased long enough to keep his prescription up and to get out of the house when his mother starts crying in the bathroom, when Gee’s sobbing quietly in bed and the backbrace squeaks against metal. So he says nothing, looks up and nods.

“I know you’re here because of the accident involving your br-”

_“Sibling”_ , he bites out, losing Brian’s eyes and tracking the pattern on the carpet.

“Yeah, your sibling fell and damaged their spine, right?  They told me it wasn’t long after you were sectioned because your bipolar was getting out of hand so your doctors sent you here to help you deal with all of that shit in a safe place. And you sit there and you never say a word. I want to help you, Mikey, are you going to let me do my job or not?” Brian’s voice is level and calm and sincere and Mikey’s brain is chopping it up into tiny pieces.

His leg twitches under the table. “What do you want from me?”

Last year he would have lashed out by now, punched Brian in the mouth or walked out and slammed the door, looking for someone to take on. This time last year he’d go to a club and fuck as many people that would have have him, until his skin was slick and sore in a way that made him feel solid again. But now, now he has Pete and he has Gee home again and Brian looking at him like he might shatter in his chair.

“I want you to tell me when it’s bad, and how I can help make it better. I want you to know that I give a shit.” The light is too bright and washes out Brian’s skin, makes the tattoos on his arm look painted on in watercolour and his eyes weary and dark.

Mikey fidgets in the chair, his fingers tangling together, and he starts to speak.

**

Pete goes down on him in her bed when her parents are out of the house. She strips him down to his skin and presses him back into her sheets, laying him out like some prize she’s won and plans on savouring.

“I love your smile”, she says, biting the underside of his jaw and he groans, shifting on the mattress. “I want to see what it looks like when I’m done with you, bitten and kiss swollen and red.”

She licks along the seam of his lips until his mouth opens in a moan then she sweeps her tongue into his mouth, sucks and bites his bottom lip. His hands fist at the sheets then drag across her skin, needing more of her, closer, firmer. His hands are rough over her skin, pressing in the hollow of her collarbone and fluttering across her ribs. She pulls back with a grin.

He feels fragile in the best way under her eyes, sparkling and dissecting him, and he gets lost in the feel of her. Her mouth traces the lines of his muscle and the pale blue walls shift and fade in the sunlight falling through the window. His feet shuffle against the linen and she pulls them around her, edging lower down his body and biting down on the curve of his hip.

It’s a long time before she does anything but tease, dragging her tongue and fingernails in patterns along his thighs, covering him in marks, in her; but then her tongue flicks over his slit and she takes him down, every inch of him, and Mikey shakes and shakes and shakes.

She looks up at him over his body, eyes still bright, still intent on taking him apart and putting him back together in the shape of her thoughts. He lets her rip him to shreds, sweating and moaning and fading into something hot and bright and brilliant.

**

The holidays bring back Frank, Gabe, and the kitten (now cat) that still climbs into his bed and presses kisses on his cheeks before curling up on his pillow.

Frank tackles him in the hallway the minute he steps into the house, laughing and smelling like the cold.

“How hard did you miss me, Mikes?” Frank's nose is like ice where it presses under his nose.

“Not enough to put up with this.” He shoves Frank hard and fixes his glasses then calls Gee to get her puppy neutered.

Frank pulls him into a headlock that shifts into a hug and he lets himself be held just a little too tight. “How are you really?”

 

It’s a whisper, Mikey almost misses it.

He smiles into Frank’s shoulder. “Breathing, still.”

Gabe he learns about later, when Pete arrives at the house riding on Gabe’s back, her hands buried in his hair like she’s tugging on reigns. Gabe drops her to sweep Mikey into his arms.

“Mikeyway!” He presses a sloppy kiss to Mikey’s temple and Mikey swats him away.

He grabs Pete by the hood. “I didn’t order a giant, please send him back.”

Gabe drops him on the couch with a pout and Pete crawls into his lap. “Sorry babe he followed me like a stray dog. I think we’re stuck with him now.” She kisses him once, twice, three times as Gabe settles beside them on the couch.

Mikey nuzzles Pete’s throat. “Okay but don’t tell him we’re keeping him or he’ll want to sleep at the end of the bed.”

Gabe’s head rests on Mikey’s shoulder and he flicks Pete’s hair out of her eyes. “Yeah, that is true.”

**

Gee declares Ziggy her familiar and doesn’t let anyone else touch her for a week, curling on the couch with Frank with her fingers sunk into the cat’s _softsoft_ fur. The two of them become disgustingly domesticated, always kissing and curling their ankles together under the kitchen table. It’s a startlingly bright kind of gentleness that they have, like they’ve relaxed completely into one another he’s happy for them, he is.

It’s just that he kind of wants to spray them with water when they’re rubbing their noses together during a Futurama marathon.

They touch constantly, fingers linked or thighs pushed together, watching each other with heavy lidded eyes. It’s awkward enough that he considers hiding up in his room and studying for his make up tests. He suspects his mom hasn’t totally forgiven him for missing graduation, even though he was in a ward at the time.

He hears Gee giggle when Frank nips at her throat and Mikey throws a dishcloth at them.

**

Gabe is the one who calls him.

Mikey can feel his breath stuttering out of his lungs and his skin turning _whitewhitewhite_ , doesn’t know when his legs folded and he landed on the floor.

Gabe’s voice is very calm and Mikey doesn’t understand how when he’s trying force breath into his lungs. Moonlight paints his room in a sickly pale purple, bruise-coloured and nauseous and he can see those bruises on the back of his eyelids, glistening from lavender to bile yellow.

“It’s just the emergency room. Nothing is broken or damaged bad. She’s awake but she wants you, man.”

Mikey drops the phone and crawls into Gee and Frank’s bed, pulling at Frank until he sits up, rubbing his eyes and blinking away the light. “Mikes, it’s the middle of the night, what the fuck.”

“I need you to drive me to the emergency room.”

He doesn’t realise he’s crying until Gee wipes the tears from his cheeks and kisses his forehead. Frank climbs out of bed and pulls Mikey up, hushing him softly.

He doesn’t ask what happened, and that’s good, because Mikey has no words left.

**

When he gets to the hospital the world is tinged in red. His blood is hot in his veins and he needs to hurt something, someone. He needs to retaliate.

Gabe lifts Pete up where she’s half asleep on his lap and into Mikey’s arms. She snuffles into his chest and when she pulls back his shirt is tacky with blood.

“Did the police get them?” He’s talking to Gabe, but Pete is looking up at him with liquid eyes.

“Yeah, they got them.” She coughs on the end of the sentence and his arms tighten and his fists itch to smash bone apart.

“That’s a shame.” Gabe hisses and Mikey agrees. He wants - he wants to replicate every cut and bruise on her body right back on the bastards who hurt her.

Pete shakes her head and fists her hand in his shirt. “It’s fine, the police will sort things out okay.This isn’t -”

She stops and drops her head back down and Gabe signs the forms whilst Mikey and Frank lay  her down in the back seat of the car.

Mikey’s world narrows to tiny pinpricks. He never asked why she was in group, never realised - and sure there’s the Best Buy story but she said that so _easily_ , it wasn’t like _this._ And he knows now, understands why it’s a secret she had to tell him. Why her skirts only come out when the only he’s there to see her.

He sits beside her in the car, cradles her head on his lap and strokes the hair out of her face, watching her sleep.

She knew every facet of his broken.

He had no idea.

 

(Now though, now he does.)

**

The sunlight leaves her eyelashes to cast shadows across her cheeks and he traces around the bruises with the tips of his fingers as she slowly wakes up.

Gabe’s shirt swims around her, making her feel tiny and soft in his arms, in his bed. He wonders if her parents know - she’s eighteen, the doctors don’t have to call them, and neither do the police. She kisses his fingers when they brush against her lips. When her eyes blink open fully, I love you stumbles out of his mouth unwarranted.

She leans up to kiss him and whispers it back against his lips. The moment feels delicate yet concrete, like the start of something fixed and brilliant.

The world doesn’t end, and Mikey can breathe, light and okay. Pete shifts so she’s sat on top of him, thighs around his hips, and she kisses him again and again and again.

**

Brian calls him up in group to talk about how things are going. To say why he’s there, why he’s fucked up just good enough to be welcome through those doors. He doesn’t walk out, and that’s something.

Pete holds his hand the whole time, and no one laughs, no one cuts him off. No one says anything when it ends, but Brian smiles like he’s just seen sunlight for the first time and everything feels fine.

**

Pete presses her nose under his ear where she’s tucked up behind him, arms twisted around his waist. “Mikeyway?”

“Hmm?”

She shifts and throws her leg over his. “Do you ever think about just packing up and leaving? Just running away?”

He turns his head slightly so she can brush her lips against his. “Not any more. I’m pretty content with what I’ve got here.”

She makes a happy sound and the sun is starting to climb under the curtains but that doesn’t matter because they have hours of sleep ahead.

 


End file.
